A member call earlier this week summed up something we've been hearing all fall: the members who are doing best right now are the ones who spent the summer building a list of customers who order directly from them, instead of waiting for a wholesale account to come back. It's not a glamorous fix. It's an email list, a standing farmers' market table, maybe a form on a website that used to just be a photo of the creamery. But it works, and it's the reason our Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course has more people in it right now than at any point since we started tracking enrollment.
Why this, why now
Farmers' markets around the country held up better than almost anyone expected this year — outdoor, spread-out, and easy to run with a distanced line and a card reader. For a lot of small producers, the market table became the steadiest channel they had while restaurant orders were unpredictable, and a business news segment this week described the restaurant recovery as stalled again, not accelerating. That gap is exactly why the direct channel matters more this quarter than it might in an ordinary year.
For a lot of members, the market table also became a substitute for a wholesale relationship that quietly went quiet. One farmstead producer told us she lost more than half her restaurant accounts by early summer and rebuilt most of that revenue through a market booth and a standing weekly order list built from names she collected there — nothing more sophisticated than a clipboard and a follow-up email. That's the pattern the course is built around: cheap tools, used consistently, aimed at people who already like your cheese.
The course walks through the basics that turn a market table into a mailing list: capturing an email or a phone number at the point of sale, a simple pre-order system for holiday cheese boards, and pricing a direct order so it actually covers the extra packaging and shipping a wholesale account never charged you for. None of it requires new equipment. Most of it requires deciding, on purpose, to ask every customer for a way to reach them again.
A caution on the packaging side
A few members jumping into shipping for the first time this year have asked us about aging cheese in transit — a wheel that's fine on your shelf can sweat or soften if it sits in a warm truck for two days. That's a shipping and packaging question, not a food-safety one, and it's worth testing with a short local run before you commit to a national holiday shipping plan. If you want the food-safety side covered too, Listeria Control in Small Creameries runs alongside this course and several members have taken both back to back this fall.
If you've been meaning to get serious about direct sales before the holiday order window closes, this is the moment — cohorts are filling and the next one starts soon. Reach the Education Committee for the current schedule and a look at what a first pre-order campaign should include.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.